


he likes to be my bittersweet love

by jonphaedrus



Series: let's go to bed before you say how you feel [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Academy Era, Consensual Underage Sex, Frottage, M/M, Service Top, Teenagers Having Bad Teenage Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-25
Updated: 2016-10-25
Packaged: 2018-08-24 16:30:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8379409
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonphaedrus/pseuds/jonphaedrus
Summary: “Great,” Nero crowed, horrifically delighted, as he knelt on the ground and started to build the branches together into a fire. “Two days in the wilderness with you, soaking wet, with nothing to eat! Delightful!”“Oh, like you’re helping us get out of here!” Cid snapped back, pushing his wet hair out of his face again.





	

**Author's Note:**

> the lorebook entry on nero murdered my family, burned my house to the ground, gave me depression, made me fail my classes, etc,

Cid Garlond looked a lot less perfect with mud in his hair.

“This is your fault,” said the other boy, currently sitting on the swampy ground, his right eyebrow singed most of the way off, his usual fluff of hair pelted flat and stringy from the rain. “I’ve never had this problem before.”

“Nobody’s perfect, Garlond.” Nero, despite having a bloody lip and mud in his socks, was in a delightful humour, mostly because it actually _was_ Cid’s fault, not his. He hadn’t been the one who had made the modifications to the engine, saying it would go faster. The only person Cid had to blame for being out here in the sleet, muddy, soaking, and struggling to put out the smouldering fire that was the remains of their practice airship model was his own damn self. “You can admit your mistakes.”

Cid said something very impolite. Nero snickered, and finished undoing the strap for the canvas top of the airship and peeled it off of the wireframe, dragging the tarp down to the ground with them. It, miraculously, had not been torn in the landing, and it wasn’t too hard to drag it over to a copse of trees nearby. While Cid was still trying to put the fire out, Nero tied the tarp up as high as he could easily reach, knotting it up in order to make a makeshift tent of about five fulms square that, once it dried out, would be a nicely enclosed shelter.

They were lucky, he supposed, as he went back over to the wreck and started trying to rescue parts from it. Cid had already ripped out almost all of the wiring to repair a transmitter, which he was currently trying to fix with percussive maintenance where he was crouched on the ground, hair and mud in his eyes. Nero wasn’t after the wiring—he hunted around until he managed to find the badly-dinged steering wheel, and unscrewed it from its housing. That, plus a metal panel from the dash, made a cooking bowl. A few careful cuts with his knife and he managed to peel up the leather that covered the wood on the deck, and dragged that over to the space he’d demarcated with the tarp, set it down on the ground to keep the mud from soaking into their flight clothes.

Cid, annoyed and sopping, eventually slunk under as well, and squeezed his hair out over the side of the leather into the mud. Despite their heavily weatherproofed flight coats, he was still shivering with cold. He eventually shucked his fireproof gloves to get at the wiring more carefully, and he picked through the transmitter while Nero hunted for semi-dry branches. He finally slammed shut the back of the transmitter with a triumphant grunt, and pulled out the antenna, twisting the handle to get the caeruleum flowing, and sighed.

“How long do you think it will take before someone finds us with that?” Nero asked, dumping a handful of wood into their tent.

“Probably two or three days. The signal must be absolutely miserable on this thing.” Cid poked at it again. “If it stops raining I’ll try and get it working better.”

“Great,” Nero crowed, horrifically delighted, as he knelt on the ground and started to build the branches together into a fire. “Two days in the wilderness with you, soaking wet, with nothing to eat! Delightful!”

“Oh, like you’re helping us get out of here!” Cid snapped back, pushing his wet hair out of his face again. He looked ridiculous, scowling, his skin pallid and his cheeks flushed, blue eyes overbright and mud _still_ in his hair, with the one eyebrow gone. “What have you been doing while I’ve been making this damn thing work?”

“This,” Nero replied, completely calmly, as he took the flint and steel from his pockets and struck a spark into the stack of sticks and dried pine needles. The fire sputtered, and then caught, smoking heavily because of how damp the wood was. Cid, shocked, stared at the fire mouth partway open, and blinked at Nero.

“Oh,” the other boy settled on at last, apparently flabbergasted.

Pleased with himself, Nero stood up and gestured with his head out of their makeshift shelter. “I’m going to go try and find something to eat.”

“Right.” Cid was still staring at him like Nero’d just grown a fourth eye. “I’m going to...see what I can do with the airship. Then. I guess.”

“You do that.”

 

 

Nero went foraging until the remaining light, badly greyed-out through the thick, dark cloud cover, had almost entirely faded. For his attempt he had been successful with three heads of Garlean garlic, a handful of green onions (one of which he was presently chewing on as he walked) and a marmot, which he had managed to catch and kill with his knife and was now tucked under his arm. By the time he returned to the shelter it was full dark, and Cid had managed to deconstruct the better part of the airship, and had started to create a better support for the transmitter. He’d taken off his coat as the fire had warmed him up, and was in only his undershirt, the powerful muscles of his shoulders and biceps still damp from the rain, his thick hair pulled back from his face with string. It was drying out, and puffing into a mess because of it, frizzing slightly in the humidity.

Rather than bring the water in with him, Nero shed his own coat and boots outside of the leather and the tarp, and flopped into the shelter, scrubbing water out of his own hair and onto the ground outside. He’d gotten so wet walking around that his hair was now almost straight because of it, pulled flush down into his eyes. He scrambled out of his trousers as well, and squeezed all the water into the mud before he laid them flat beside the fire, to dry them out. Cid had done much the same with his coat, which was laid out beside him, steaming.

“Any luck?”

“A damned linkperl would make my life immeasurably easier.” When angry, Cid had a habit of taking his ill-temper out on whatever he was working on. This was one such time: he banged his hammer into the antennae he was crafting, the clang loud in the forest.

“Don’t do that,” Nero said. Cid paused and looked up at him, confused. Now that he was mostly dry, the missing eyebrow looked even more ridiculous, giving him an appearance that he was utterly startled. “I for one don’t want to take down any hungry beasts with only your toolkit and my knife.”

“So be quiet?”

Nero looked at him like he was an idiot. Which he was. And then, because he felt almost bad for this city boy totally out of his depth outside of his workroom, dealing with nature and not with magitek, he held out an onion as a gift of goodwill. “Have an onion.”

Cid stared at the onion. And then stared at Nero.

“Wh—how. _Where_ did you get an onion?” Nero shook the onion at him, trying to get him to take it. “ _Why_ do you have an onion?”

“To eat.” Nero paused, and added, after he chucked the onion at the other boy, “Idiot.”

Cid, wisely, took the onion.

Grabbing the makeshift pot he’d put together earlier, Nero held the cup of the steering wheel out under the edge of the tarp, and let it fill with water. With a couple of more solid branches, which he cut down with his knife, he stuck it above the fire, and let it heat up to boil. Cid, bemused, was chewing on the onion, and watched in fascination as Nero picked up the dead marmot and used the larger piece of dashboard plating to catch the mess as he skinned it. With the tarp catching the smoke and the both of them by the fire, it was fairly warm, all things considered, even though he was in only an undershirt and his drawers. Cleaning animals to eat was always hard work as well, and as he worked, his hair continued to dry, curling without any product in it. Soon enough, he was comfortably warm, if still damp. That wouldn’t stay, though—the night was cooling. He’d need to dry his clothes.

Once the marmot was cleaned and gutted, Nero sliced the meat into the pot with the water, and added to it the onions and garlic he had found, washing them in the downpour and scrubbing them dirt-free with his fingernails.That, plus the bones to give it more flavour, was a hopeful attempt at something to eat without anything aside from ingenuity and foraging.

It wasn’t until he was done, stirring the pot of theoretical soup with his knife tip, that Nero looked over and realised that Cid was goggling at him, blue eyes obnoxiously wide, mouth half-open, the onion caught tipping up against the back of his front teeth. He blinked.

“You look stupid,” Nero said at last, sitting back on his haunches slightly. He felt embarrassed, making what would probably be almost inedible soup, wearing nothing but his drawers, his hair a mess of curls, while the smartest, most talented person he’d ever met watched him like he had just invented a new engine. He wanted Cid to pay attention to him; to realise that Nero was (almost) as good as he was, but he didn’t...want Cid to pay attention to him _right now_. He _wanted_ Cid to pay attention to him when he was figuring out how to decode Allagan scripts or backwards engineering Cid’s illegible building work. The whole point was that Nero was amazing for what he could do and how brilliant he was: not that he could make a shitty pot of soup.

“How do you know how to _do_ this,” Cid settled at last, finishing chewing on the onion and setting aside the last bit of the green stalk. “You found that food and you’re just cooking it and. How did you clean that marmot like that? How did you even _catch_ it?” Cid’s eyes were bright; he’d moved past being flabbergasted and on to fascination and curiosity—as always, he wanted as much information as possible as quickly as possible. “Teach me.”

“I—“ Nero was startled. “I grew up on a _farm_ , Garlond. Not everyone gets to grow up in the city.” He huffed and hunched his shoulders up, trying to hide the flush on his high cheekbones. His freckles always showed more when he flushed. Decode a tomestone? Cid didn’t care. _Cook soup_? Suddenly Cid realised Nero even _existed._ “It’s not that hard. You should know anyway. I won’t always be there to feed you.”

“Well,” Cid replied, as if it was the most natural thing on Hydaelyn, “I thought we would be partners together, after we graduate. When we aren’t fighting we work well.”

Nero’s ears burned.

“We’re always fighting,” he grumbled, focusing on the soup. “You’re a nightmare to work with, I never want to see your face after we graduate.” But, but, but—Cid laughed.

“If you say so!”

 

 

The soup was terrible. Cid still ate it like it was the best thing he’d ever had, and complimented Nero when it was done. They slept huddled together, back to back, Nero’s bony knees tucked up against his chest and Cid still fiddling with his transmitter past the time he fell asleep.

He woke with first light, dawn cracking through the trees, stained red by the tarp of their tent. For a long moment Nero lay there, cataloguing his aches from the previous day: his split lip was scabbed, his bruises from the landing tender but not painful, his shoulders tense from sleeping on the ground in the cold. He spent another extra ten minutes trying to figure out what to do because he’d woken up with his head on Cid’s chest, the curly hair in his armpit partly in Nero’s eye. He didn’t know what to do with it. He didn’t know where he was supposed to go.

That was, of course, his prime mistake: he lay there so long that Cid woke up, abruptly, snuffling into wakefulness and shifting before he froze because of the weight Nero was on his chest. They both sat there, totally still, neither one of them moving, both of them knowing that the other was awake. “Sorry,” Nero took the dive after a moment, rolling away and sitting up, scrubbing his cold fingers through his hair, curls bouncing under the pressure, huddling his knees back up to his chest and reaching out to grab the flint and steel to strike the fire back into life, “Cold night.” And then, the fire struck, one hand feeding more sticks into it, he turned slightly and looked back at Cid and—

He was just sprawled there, blue eyes hazy and gentle with sleep. His hair was a complete wreck, the white strands all over his face and mussed behind his head, his chin and upper lip sprouting a few scraggly hairs that had grown in without a shave. His lips were full and spread slightly, his pale cheeks with their first few sprouting hairs warm in the dawn light. His shoulders, which Nero had never before _considered_ were just so broad, and he’d just been sleeping on them, on the powerful muscles of the other boy’s chest and shoulders and arms, that were shifting under his skin as he stretched, yawning, showing the underside of one pectoral through his open flight jacket.

“I like you better when you’re asleep,” Cid mumbled, like they hadn’t been sharing a dorm room for literally over a year and Cid saw him asleep every single night because Cid _never slept_ , “You talk less.”

“Thanks,” Nero replied, drily, as he hunched back up, turning to the fire to make sure it didn’t sputter out. Cid, when he did succumb to sleep, talked all damn night—he never stopped talking, never stopped _thinking_. “I wish you stopped talking when you slept. I’d like you a lot more because then I’d know how to shut you up.”

“I know how to shut me up,” Cid replied, blasé and amused. Nero turned around to look at him, scowling.

“You going to share with the class, Garlond?”

Cid grinned at him. He’d sat up, leaning back on his elbows, one shoulder cocked up to his ear. It was Cid who moved closer, Cid who lifted his chin up toward Nero, Cid who half-closed his eyes with a smile. It was Cid who tilted his head toward one side, and tucked his nose just under Nero’s, and it was Cid who bridged that last half-breathless gasp between their lips and kissed him. Kissed Nero. Kissed Nero like it was the simplest thing anyone had ever done in his life, kissed Nero like he did everything else: utterly comfortably. Kissed Nero like he’d worked the entire thing out and knew that this was the solution to the problem, even if he couldn’t for the life of him explain to anybody else in the group _why_ that totally incoherent variable was the right answer. Kissed him, but at his broken lip, clumsy and tired and fumbling and he didn’t know what to do with his _hands_ or his _nose_. All he could think about was how soft despite their airship-chap Cid’s thin lips were against his, how he smelled half like sleep and half like wiring and engine grease. And kissed him back because he _still didn’t know what to do with his hands._

Cid knew what to do with his hands. One of them was fingers clenching around the sleeve of Nero’s undershirt, dragging the cloth away from his skin, knuckles of his thumbs brushing against Nero’s armpit. The other was anchored in the thick hair at the back of his neck, tangled in the wavy strands. Nero just fumbled, leaning forward, let Cid pull him down and closer and into it, one palm finally flattening over the other boy’s hipbone and the other leaned against the ground, taking both their weights.

Nero had never kissed anyone like this before. He’d kissed before—awkward fumblings with hands too scared to touch, in the hay, or behind the house, or down by the brook—but he’d never _kissed_ before, and this was a _kiss_. He felt like Cid was going to peel him living out of his own skin just kissing him, he was going to drown on dry land just kissing him. Despite the chill outside their tent he was boiling hot, his heartbeat loud and throbbing in his own ears, and he kept making noises he didn’t know that he was making into Cid’s open mouth, high and whispered and shattered.

Somehow—Cid’s knee, looped over his hipbone. Their cocks, hard in their trousers, pulled together and their thighs cluttering each others’ space. Cid dragging Nero over him without a care for their near-fulm in height difference, Nero having to make up for it by hunching his shoulders awkwardly. The clumsy, desperate way that Cid kept urging him on, rocking his hips up and off of the ground and into Nero until he was shaking, clammy sweat beading at the back of his neck in his hairline. And then just their erections finally lining up perfectly, hard to hard, and pressure, and friction, and—

Nero came hard in his pants, wheezing between his grit teeth, sobbing desperately into Cid’s mouth, nails digging into his hipbone through his trousers, shuddering hard against him. Cid started laughing not-unkindly, and shoved him backward, Nero’s ass hitting the ground, and climbed back over him. Above him, the sun through the red tarp cast his white hair into fire, his thin lips swollen and red, his cheekbones flushed so bright they looked like they burned. Nero’s breath was ragged and burned in his throat, and he didn’t blink once as he watched Cid grind his cockhead into oversensitivity and himself into orgasm.

He looked—radiant. Cid Garlond orgasming was the most beautiful thing Nero had ever seen. The way just the right side of his jaw tightened, his lower lip tucking up and pulled back over his bottom teeth. His eyebrows drawn low, the missing one awkward, his blue, blue eyes shut with the focus of the feeling. His thick hair was plastered to his forehead and over his cheekbones, his breath catching and hanging in midair, held through and over unto the end.

He eventually shuddered, and slumped, and Nero found himself with an unexpected lap- and arm-full of Cid Garlond, Garlean golden boy, rounded chin digging into his shoulder, the other boy’s hair in his mouth. He _also_ found himself with his drawers sticky and wet, and his mind completely blank, like he’d just sand-blasted out his thoughts like he would have done to smooth metal on a grinding wheel.

“Now what,” Nero croaked at last, bending back to lean on one elbow as Cid got more comfortable on his lap. With the extra height it granted him, he was finally the same height as Nero, and it was surreal to have him at eye-level. While Nero had been growing like a tree, straight up, and still not done, Cid had been getting wider, muscle building on his torso and around his shoulders and on his thighs.

“Not sure,” Cid admitted, and at least they were both totally out of their depths. That was reassuring, in a very unreassuring way. “We should probably eat something.”

“That wasn’t what I _meant_ ,” Nero grumbled, pulling back slightly as Cid sat up off of him, blunt fingers scooping his hair back up off of his face, tucking strands behind his ears. “I mean are we.” He hesitated, throat bobbing. “You know. When we go home. And back.”

“Well, I figured we’d do this again, in a bed.” Cid’s thumb brushed over Nero’s cheekbone. “Mine, or yours. Yours is cleaner.”

 

 

He wiped out his drawers as best as he could outside afterward. The sleet the evening before had turned into a frost overnight, and the underbrush was covered in ice. In the daylight, Nero was able to find a stream and refill their canteens, and then washed his hands, before he went hunting for something to eat.

As he walked, he thought. Huddled in his coat, dried overnight with the fire, the few good firewood branches he’d found tucked under his arm, he chewed on his re-split lip and tried to figure out where to go from where he was. Because that was the _problem_ —he didn’t have a single issue kissing Cid until they both came in their pants. He’d wanted to kiss Cid since he’d laid eyes on the boy the year before, when he’d been shuffled into this tiny dorm room shared with the smartest boy alive, whose father had looked down his perfect sloped nose at Nero like he was an aldogoat pat. Cid had never looked at him like that. Cid had ignored almost all of Nero’s barbs, and his point of view of the competition had always been good-natured, even if Nero had rarely treated it as such.

Nero would have done anything to win. He also would have done anything to pin Cid to his disgusting, weeks-unwashed bedsheets, engine grease wiped onto them, and bitten his lips until they bled just to see what sounds Cid would make moaning into his mouth. As it turned out, it was Cid who had pinned _him_ to the ground, Cid who had bitten _his_ lips to bleeding, and the one who had whimpered and moaned and cried out was Nero. He had gotten what he wanted but not how he wanted it; he wanted Cid on his knees with his lips all swollen and his eyes soft looking at Nero like he was—like he maybe lov—

_Fuck._


End file.
